Families of Egyptian "Hezbollah" detainees allege intimidation

Apr 15, 2009, 12:22 GMT

Al-Arish, Egypt - Families of Egyptian men detained on suspicion of plotting attacks against Egypt on behalf of the Lebanese group Hezbollah have been warned against meeting with rights lawyers, one of the lawyers alleged on Wednesday.

Officers from Egypt's domestic intelligence agency, State Security Investigations, telephoned family members and warned them against attending a meeting with rights lawyers in the north Sinai town of al-Arish, according to Sayed Fathi, a lawyer with Cairo's al-Hilali Foundation for Human Rights.

Fathi, who said he was seeking to represent some of the detainees, told the German Press Agency dpa that family members had planned to meet at the al-Arish headquarters of the leftist Tagammu Party, a local centre for opposition, on Tuesday night.

However, family members had cancelled the meeting following warnings from security officers not to attend.

In remarks published in the independent daily al-Masri al-Youm on Wednesday, Islamist lawyer Montasser al-Zayat said that a purported confession from his client, Lebanese national Sami Shehab, had been false.

Al-Masri al-Youm on Monday wrote that Shehab had told a State Security prosecutor that he had been sent to Egypt in 2005 to establish a Hezbollah cell in the country and to smuggle fighters and weapons from Sudan to the Gaza Strip via Egypt.

The daily reported Wednesday that al-Zayat said his client had admitted to being a Hezbollah member, but that he denied smuggling weapons, explosives or fighters to the Gaza Strip.

Hamid Rashid, an Egyptian Interior Ministry official, on Tuesday told a parliamentary committee that accusations that the detainees had been tortured during interrogations were false.

Rights lawyer Abdel-Moneim Abdel-Maqsud, who said he was representing some of the detainees, had told dpa on Friday that his clients had alleged torture.

He said one of them had been released to a hospital 'half- paralysed' as a result of having been left naked and soaked with cold water in a hyper-airconditioned room for 24 hours.

In a televised address on Friday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah named Shehab as a Hezbollah member, but denied that he had been plotting attacks in Egypt.

Nasrallah's address came two days after Egypt's public prosecutor, Abdel-Magid Mohammed, accused Nasrallah of dispatching 'about 49' agents to Egypt to carry out attacks in Egypt, to spy on the country, and to 'spread Shiite thought' in the predominantly Sunni country.